As in the religious ceremonies of almost all, if not all ancient peoples, so in Egypt, too, wine was offered to the gods. Two kinds of vases were principally employed for that purpose, and one of considerable height was on grand occasions carried before the king in processions. Coming down to a later period in Egyptian history, that is to say, about the commencement of the Christian era, we find that wine was not only consumed in that country, but it was even exported to Europe. Athenæus, a comedy writer who lived in Egypt, and subsequently in Rome, about A.D. 230, mentions several kinds of Egyptian wine which were highly prized in Greece and Italy. One was called the mareotic wine, which took its name from a fountain called Marea, in the district of Alexandria, and from a town of the same name.[142] This wine is described as white, sweet, good for the breath, and digestible, and a special recommendation is that “it never produces any ill effect on the head.” The reader must not, however, infer from this that sobriety was the order of the day in the time of Athenæus, for he will soon be undeceived on that score. Other descriptions of Egyptian wine are mentioned by the same author, and the best of all appears to have been the wine of Antylla, a city near Alexandria, the revenues from the sale of which, he says, “the kings of those ages—both the Egyptian and Persian kings—used to give to their wives as pin-money.” Here, again, we have independent evidence of the antiquity of wine in Egypt; for the period referred to by Athenæus must have been long prior to his day. His writings, to which we shall have occasion to refer in a succeeding chapter, give anything but a flattering account of the ancient Egyptians, and according to him they must have been great topers. “Now, that the Egyptians really are fond of wine,” he says, “this is a proof that they are the only people amongst whom it is a custom at their feasts to eat boiled cabbages before all the rest of their food, and even to this very time they do so. And many people add cabbage seed to potions which they prepare as preventives against drunkenness. And wherever a vineyard has cabbages growing in it, there the wine is weaker.”[143] And then the author, as is his custom, clenches his assertion with corroborative testimony, chiefly in the form of extracts from the writings of older authors. Two of these, which are in verse, we will transcribe just as he gives them, for the amusement of our readers:— “And Eubulus says, somewhere or other: ‘Wife, quick! some cabbage boil, of virtuous healing, That I may rid me of this seedy feeling!’” “And so Alexis says: ‘Last evening, you were drinking deep, So now your head aches. Go to sleep: Take some boiled cabbage when you wake, And there’s an end of your headache!’”